“We survived because we upheld the highest standards of our profession while mantaining our identity as black people.”
Essay by Paul Brock, photograph by Robert Miller
Long before becoming NABJ’s first president, Chuck Stone was a journalistic legend. He had edited three influential black newspapers — the New York Age, the Wa s h i n g t o n A f r o A m e r i c a n a n d t h e Chicago Defender. He had written two nonfiction books, “Tell It Like It Is” and “Back Political Power in America,” and a novel, “King Strut.” He had been Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell’s chief administrative assistant and speechwriter.
As the now-defunct Washington Star put it in 1969, Stone was a “tough-minded militant” who “probably poured forth more angry rhetoric, ruffled more political moderates and simultaneously pacified and frightened more whites than most of (Washington’s) other black leaders.” He mellowed not one bit after becoming an outspoken columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News in 1971.
Enough of a firebrand to have worked with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, yet with unassailable journalistic credentials, the sharp- tongued but affable Stone was superbly suited to be the first leader of an organization seeking to not only change the way the media would tell black America’s story, but who was going to tell it.
Moreover, reaching that goal would require organizing the previously unorganizable — black journalists. They had been trying and failing for years to pull together a national group representing their interests.
“The challenge we faced was on two levels. Creating NABJ was black journalists’ response to the Kerner Commission’s call for improving the coverage of the black community, ” Stone recalled. “We set out to both increase black employment in the mainstream media and, just as importantly, to examine and analyze the institutionalized racism that plagued the reporting about black people in the mainstream media.”
Stone used an acronym to evaluate stories: FEAT, for fair, even-handed, accurate and thorough.
“The mainstream papers just weren’t living up to that standard,” he said.“Even when they weren’t making serious factual errors, they weren’t giving the complete picture of what was happening to blacks. That’s what we had in mind.”
As president of the Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, Stone led one of the well-organized local journalists’ associations that came together as NABJ. Others included the Washington Association of Black Journalists, the Chicago Black Journalists and the Baltimore Black Media Workers.
But before NABJ could get off the ground, it had to define what it stood for. Stone had definite ideas about that.
“ The one thing I insisted on was that we be called journalists, not media workers or some other euphemism,” he recalled. “I said I wouldn’t be part of any organization that called itself anything else. In a sense, it was a way of adding dignity and authenticity to our profession. I think choosing to call ourselves journalists helped to attract people to our ranks.”
It is almost impossible to overstate the obstacles facing the 120 black journalists invited by the NABJ Interim Committee to meet at Washington Sheraton Park Hotel on Dec. 12, 1975. Only 44 actually signed the roster and paid dues, and thus became founding members. But they and many more showed up the next night for a dinner at which James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Congresswoman Yvonne Burke of California spoke.
At the time, the best guess was that African Americans made up less than one-tenth of 1 percent of journalists at major newspapers. The percentage in the broadcast media was higher, about 4 percent, because the Federal Communications Commission insisted that television stations hire minorities.
Much of the media — typified by Herb Lipson, publisher of Philadelphia Magazine, who blasted the new organization in an editorial — bristled with hostility toward the very idea of a black journalists’ group.
“Even some white journalists who were normally allies just did not see the professional imperative for a black journalists’ organization,” Stone recalled. “They claimed they saw a conflict of interest between the standards of the profession and our proclaimed ethnicity and gently speculated about our ability to be ‘objective.’”
For some, the backlash was more than verbal.
One of NABJ’s first regional directors, Sandra Gilliam-Beale, a television anchor in Toledo, Ohio, was frankly given the choice of resigning from the organization or losing her job. Some black reporters refrained from joining out of fear they would suffer the same fate. But many more, of course, defied the threats of their editors and news directors and joined.
That was largely because during two one-year terms as president, Stone worked relentlessly to establish NABJ as a national presence. He spoke out forcefully against the racially exclusionary hiring practices of the nation’s major dailies. Speaking for NABJ, he castigated presidential candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter for ignoring African American issues and concerns, and demanded that President Ford’s Interior Secretary Earl Butz be fired for publicly telling a racially demeaning joke.
And he seemed to take particular glee in pointing out instances of biased reporting, such as the time when The Washington Post put a story about a black rape suspect on the front page on the same day it buried a piece about a white rape suspect deep in the metro section.
“We cited any number of specific instances of that kind of shoddy reporting,” Stone said,“that showed how deeply racism was [embedded] in the mainstream media. I used to drive (Post Executive Editor) Ben Bradlee crazy.
” For all of his successes at calling attention to the media’s failings, Stone failed to reach one group: major university journalism schools.
“ They have still not done enough in attracting minority students and teachers to their classrooms,” he said,“and the historically black colleges and universities cannot fill the void by themselves. Our efforts with the journalism schools while I was president of NABJ were mostly stonewalled by disinterest and subtle racism.”
The continuing dearth of minority journalists coming out of “J” school, he added, means the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) has a handy excuse for not hiring more minorities.
“They’re once again saying they can’t find any, and this time they’re probably telling the truth,” he said.
After stepping down from the presidency, Stone continued to break new journalistic ground.
Because of his reputation for integrity, he became a trusted middleman between Philadelphia police and murder suspects, more than 75 of whom “surrendered” to Stone rather than to the cops. He also negotiated the release of hostages five times — in a prison, a bank, a motel and two private homes. He became a leading critic of the city’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, for the 1985 Operation MOVE bombing that killed 11 people and wiped out an entire neighborhood.
In 1991, to the almost audible relief of Philadelphia politicians, Stone retired from daily journalism to accept the Walter Spearman professorship at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication. (He has also held visiting professorships at Syracuse University and Trinity College in his hometown of Hartford, Conn., and was a John F Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for Politics.) He recently retired from UNC — sort of. He planned to keep an office there and focus on writing three more books.
As for the association, Stone said: “In my wildest dreams, I never thought NABJ would grow to have 3,500 members. I thought we’d have maybe two or three hundred. At the start, we were ridiculed, we were pressured, we were questioned by all sorts of people who never questioned anyone else’s right to come together in their own interests. We survived because we upheld the highest standards of our profession while maintaining our identity as black people. We knew we had to be the best. We couldn’t even afford mediocrity because we were under a microscope.”
That attitude put NABJ on a solid foundation a quarter century ago and laid the groundwork for the organizational strength it enjoys today
